If your website is lost to Google (aka “The Man”), not just buried in the SERPs, it may have violated Google’s Terms of Service (TOS) by singular or multiple violations. This isn’t a mistake, so be prepared to get on your knees, confess your crimes, wait for the Googlers to flip the switch back on and release you from spammers’ prison.

In the Post Mortem: Site Forensics Session at Search Engine Strategies, New York Michael Stebbins, CEO and Founder of Market Motive and Rand Fishkin, you know, CEO of SEOmoz, divulged the how to tell if your site has been banned or penalized and the subsequent hoops one must jump through to regain Google’s trust.

Starting the session, moderator Adam Goldberg, Chief Innovation Officer at ClearSaleing introduced the speakers and handed over the podium to Stebbins. “First things first, find out if you are really banned or just penalized.”

How to Know For Certain:

• Google Webmaster tools. (Google will straight-up tell you if you are)
• Or site search query
  • Site:HatsOfMeat.com
  • If you see results, it’s NOT banned (Whew )

That said, one should be aware of what will piss off the Giant. Stebbins grouped the sins into three categories, Venial (Forgivable), Regular Sins (Not good, but wont get you banned, just penalized) and Mortal Sins, (You’re not going to like where this leads, believe it).

Venial Sin, Removed by a Technical Mistake

• ie Robots.txt moved from staging server to live server
• No sweat & easy to fix

Sin Myth: Repeated Requests to Google

• NOT reason for website removal
• Typically confused with getting services blocked to a client

Sin 1: Linking to Bad Neighborhoods

• Red flag to Google
• Imply reciprocal links and/or agreements that are not natural representation of organic and “genuine” relevance.

Sin 2: Keeping Bad Company

• Are you sharing server IP addresses with bad sites? (What do you mean “you don’t know?!)
• Find Out ASAP!
  • Who’s on my web server?
  • Have any of those sites been banned
  • IP addresses are seen as a common ownership sign
  • My IP Neighbors or Link Vendor
  • Any sites with zero pages? (Pssst! that’s  not good)
    • If there are only a few, search by hand
    • Many, write a small script

Solution: Move the site to a dedicated server.

Sin 3: Using Other People’s Content

• First page wins, the rest are “less relevant”
• You don’t usually get pulled for JUST this, but it exacerbates the other sins

MORTAL SIN 1: Fake Popularity

• >80% links are to (or from) your other sites!
• Same ownership is detected using:
  • Server class C IP address (90% certainty)
  • AdSense ID (90% certain, if the checks are all going to the same dude… The Man can connect the dots…)
  • Site registration information (90% certain when manual)

MORTAL SIN 2: Selling Naked Links

• Links that pass juice
• Usually results in penalty but CAN result in removal
• Exacerbated by other sins… if caught
• Hard to detect: Sites can fly under the radar
  • Unless ratted out
  • “buy text links” or other like phrases on site (well, that’s just plain dumb)
  • Google will take away your power ie devaluation from PR8 to PR3 to try and get you in line for this sin.

MORTAL SIN3: Fake Relevance

• Robots are BLIND & DEAF
  • It’s OK to present different content to bots than users (as long as the intent is not to rank)
  • Hiding text
  • Hiding links
  • Hiding auto redirects
  • Doorway pages

How To Get Re-Included

• If your site has committed 3 mortal sins… move on, darlin’ this ship has not only sailed, it SUNK. Invest elsewhere.
• 2 mortal sins, worth a try…
  • Fix problems
  • Prepare to confess your sins… IN DETAIL
  • Submit site for reconsideration along with the mea culpa
  • If multiple sites with similar template or IP address
    • Get ONE re-included, then reset (Kind of Sophie’s Choice here, I know, it’s hard)
    • Tell them why you love your site, why you need it to be saved, why it’s relevant
    • Admit what you did wrong in the past tense
    • Show what you are doing right now that you know better

Stebbins closed with a good rule of thumb: “Follow the money. Search Engines only work if their algorithm produces relevant results with genuine popularity. Genuine relevance and popularity ensures you are a good partner for Google.”

While transitioning between presentation Goldberg asked: “If your competitor is committing these sins, can you rat them out?” (Muhahaha!)

Fishkin answered: “Reporting spam has little to no effect (especially recently). But, if there are multiple egregious sins, send it through webmaster tools & create publicity around it, like SEO blogs. Bring it to the attention of people in those spheres and the word will get around .”

And with that Fishkin took the podium with his deck entitled: Bans & Penalties: Knowing When to Hold ‘Em, When to Fold ‘Em and How to Circumvent Google Penalties

First things first, confirm you’ve been banned/penalized through the methods Stebbins discussed.

Ok, so you are banned/penalized. *sob* What now?!

Our instincts are either fight or flight, Fishkin outlines what the conditions are for holding your own and standing your ground, or running away to a new domain with your tail between your legs.

Conditions for a Fight: (Let’s get ready to RUMBLE!)

• Respected/prominent/growing brand (especially if it’s your one and only brand)

• Single site (or maybe 2 or 3…)

• If you own many sites, the Engine has a perception that you’re not normal = red flag (Who needs 237 sites? No one.)

• Low number of offenses

• First time offender, fix it, apologize and learn from the paddling Google gave you (‘Cause the second time around isn’t going to be as easy).

• Connections to the Man and the people who work for him (aka Googlers)

• Face to face interactions can really help (even on the interwebnets!)

When to Fly

• Somewhat-easy-to-reporduce Site
• Low Brand Value
• Low Quality/Quantity of links
• Multi-strike offender
• You have the experience to do(know) better next time.

But…

Get Black Hat Results With White Hat Tactics

Legal ways to do stuff you’ve been penalized for:

• Lots of targeted anchor text quick – link bait/link magnets! (make industry friends QUICK)

• Embedded Content (badges & widgets) – Make embeded content easy to obtain & have it link back to your site. (GIVE it away!)

• Branding and product naming – consult Google’s keyword tool before naming/branding

• Content/Technology Licensing – assuming you have great content to license out…

• Showing Different Content to Engines versus users (it’s OK as long as the intent is not to manipulate) Cookies/session IDs & Logged-In Users

• Selling Links (*nudge, nudge. wink, wink*) – Sell access to a link-likely audience (Mashable, techCrunch, StumpleUpon, Techmeme etc)

• Redirect “Live Link” conversations to Event Sponsorships/Promotions/Partnerships

“we don’t sell links because it’s against Google’s TOS, BUT… we can have you sponsor a Schmoozefest we’re hosting”

• Sell “Reviews” of Sites/Products/Services For Potential Inclusion; Not “Links” ie Best of the Web (you’re buying the review).

There you have it, fellas and dames, now have some good clean, legal fun.

photo credit: jdnx

I had a near out of body-real-time SMS/search/tweet experience last night interacting with our attorney, Laura.  (No, the picture’s not Laura.)  She’s in Manhattan to attend the Social Media Risks and Rewards legal conference, and pinged me to quick-search for information about a ruckus she was observing outside the famed Waldorf Astoria.

Our innocent little text exchange and my ensuing searches (illustrated later in this article) make it entirely clear there’s a radical new type of query intent (what users’ are looking for): situational. It turns out Google’s not adept at some situational searches which, to some minds,  leaves them vulnerable to services like Twitter in a substantial segment of emerging search inventory.

Situational searches happen when users seek information about transient or faster moving events, not necessarily the most important happenings in the world-by-the-numbers, but very important to someone.  For instance a situational search is when a user wants to know why an unexpected motorcade is driving through town or a street corner crowd gathered.  An explosion on the horizon, before news outlets and search engines grab hold of the buzz, also qualifies as situational.

Situational searches can be associated with micro demographics or massive constituencies.  This evolving query type surrounds users who want to know now, in the moment, about something happening and faster than last-gen search engines index human activity.

Query Intent Background
Research-types dissemble categories of query-intent by user’s purpose. The classic subdivision breaks out as follows: a) navigational (searcher looking for specific site) b) Informational (research oriented) c) Transactional (ready to do something like buy). So goes traditional thinking.

The new kid on the block, “situational,” wasn’t possible in previous generations of search. The reason why is simple. There were few mainstream real-time platforms or users who were searchable.  Now there’s Twitter, Facebook, Google’s last few minutes-index, etc… There should be little doubt that Twitter does situational best. They have the real-time user base, conditioned to share in-the-moment events. Google does not have similarly conditioned users.

Now let’s get back to the text exchange with Laura, which clarifies situational searches beautifully. For TwitterSearch naysayers, we hope this anecdote, regarding Twitter and situational searches, sheds light regarding the value of such services and illustrates Google’s blind spot.

TEXT MESSAGES

L (Laura from New York): “See who is at Waldorf Astoria tonight, major security. Machine guns.”

M (Marty in Duluth): “Hold on.”

L: “Looked like secret service earlier.”

M “Hold on, searching…brb [be right back]”

I Spring Into Action!
First I scanned the top of unpersonalized Google search engine results pages  (SERPs) for “Waldorf Astoria.” There was nothing there to help me figure out why there might secret service types outside now.

The rest of the page yielded no clues.

I then tried Google’s “Indexed in Last 10 Minutes” feature to see if there was anything newly indexed…nothing.

…checked out Bing: Nada, nothing, zilch…

I was thinking maybe Facebook would yield real-time fruit. Nope!

However, there are a bunch of dudes named Waldorf Astoria (hmmm)

Then it came to me, TWITTER! A quick Twitter search…

…SCORE! It turns out Matt Damon was shooting a movie at the Waldorf Astoria last night. Insiders were tweeting about it.  Twitter was the search engine to solve my situational search.

RESUME TEXT MESSAGES

M: Waldorf is a Matt Damon movie set now

L: Shut up

M: (text Twitter search string to Laura’s Blackberry)

L: [He] “hasn’t shown up yet”

M: “Do you believe in Twitter now?”

L: “F U”

L: “Facebooked it ”

M: “Bye 4 now”

L: “Later”

The Morning After
I was curious to see how mainstream SERPs looked the next morning. Now that it was clear that the event was about “Waldorf Astoria Matt Damon,” I wanted to search Google again.

There was some previously indexed content as well as an index tweet from the night before.  The older content was probably there the evening before. There was just no possible way we could have known that the event was about Matt Damon.

How about GoogleNews, searching for “Matt Damon?” After all, this is what Matt’s working on… now… today. Nothing.

How about Yahoo!? Was there anything indexed the morning after?

Even Yahoo, show-biz skank of mainstream search engines, could not associate Matt Damon with the Waldorf shoot.

Situational searches are the new query-intent type.  They occur when users want to find out about new and/or rapidly moving situations. Google and other traditional search engines can’t generate this real-time feed because, unlike Twitter & Facebook, Google has never socialized users successfully.  The lack of engaged real-time user pool is a serious barrier to entry. Sure Google can index Twitter but the result is kind of lame. We’ll get more into that in future posts.

Also there are hybrid intents, no doubt. For instance those searching for  Dell Computer sweat-tweet in-the-moment 1-computer deals are doing “transactional situation searches.”

For any TwitterSearch naysayers, we hope a heightened understanding of situational search lends perspective on the value of such micro-blogging services, as they exist now and in the future.

On June 3rd, Matt Cutts freaked the technical SEO community by casually stating that PageRank sculpting, the subtle art of flow-managing page value distribution, had changed significantly from what Google had been prescribing.

Who cares, we don’t need noFollow. What bothers many is that know we’ve learned Google flipped the switch a year ago, all the while offering misleading public information.

Industry journalist Danny Sullivan, organizer of the SMX conference series and Editor-in-Chief of SearchEngineLand highlighted missed opportunities for Google to retract what had previously been stated as best practices. (BTW, I would have linked to SearchEngineLand in this paragraph too, but now I’m counting links.)

I note  Danny’s graciousness, even as he outlined the delay in disclosure:

“There were plenty of opportunities for this [Google disclosing]. PageRank sculpting was discussed at no less than four different conferences after the change happened, including our SMX Advanced search marketing conference in 2008. There was no end of articles and commentary on the web about it. In Matt’s video from May 23 of this year, specifically about PageRank sculpting, he said nothing about the change.” –Danny Sullivan–

Did Google Throw Matt Cutts Under the Bus?
There might be 2 possibilities and hybrids thereof for this debacle: 1) Matt Cutts, Google’s affable spam ambassador knowingly gave us misleading information. 2) Maybe his relationship with Google is somewhat detached, more insular than other insiders on the WS team. Either way, we don’t care about noFollow, my feelings are hurt.

Advanced SEOs were out there striving to work within Google’s TOS, having just finished nearly a generation of websites, built the way Google told us to do it. When Google told SEOS it works to flow PR by noFollow, we used noFollow out of trust.

Is Google suggesting that somehow we should have caught the change? For goodness Google, do you want us to test everything you tell us to do and prove that it works or find out your ambassador might have mislead us? Or was he in the dark?

So What About NoFollow?
Don’t get me wrong, we’ve used do/noFollow lightly, always asking the question “is this link an important citation, needed for the content, one that flatters the reputation of ours and the destination  publication?” The method by which Google public relations  mishandled the SEM community sure points to poor etiquette on somebody’s part.

We relied on no/doFollow for the basics, ya’ know not being completely stupid with where we want to recommend content. Like lovers that failed together (SEOS & Google), I can honestly say that nearly every SEO I’ve ever met truly cares about offering authentic citations, just like Google.

“@netmeg @aimclear plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. in other words, we didn’t worry about it before, and we’re not worrying about it now.”

“@SebastianX to complete it: As always: [...]. Don’t bother w/ rel-nofollow for anything else. For advanced SEO purposes just cloak nofollow properly.”

The SEO Changes are Good
They impel us to police the integrity of links from sites within and without. My sadness is more about the concept of an ambassador 1) not telling the truth 2) getting hung out to dry in front of the industry the ambassador serves.

The last thing I ever want to do is call anybody out. Google owns the machine and it’s a damn fine one. For goodness sake they’re a small country! Countries have ambassadors who represent positions to citizens of communities.

Colin Powell, a truly great American, seemingly got hung out to dry. The community was mad. Sound familiar? After stewing on this for a couple of days, having attended the session, I just felt it important to point out that partnerships work both ways between ambassadors and the communities they serve.

“There are times in public life as in private life when one must protest, not solely of even primarily because ones’s protest will be politic or materially productive, but because one’s sense of decency is offended, because one is fed up with political craft and public images, or simply because something goes against the grain. “The Arrogance of Power by –Senator Fulbright– (New York, Random House, Inc., 1966)

Maybe there are 2 agendas, one from Webmaster Tools & other divisions – and one from Matt himself. Google’s a pretty big company and never underestimate the propensity of freaky politics to bubble up from the holistic ooze. I’d rather eat a live chicken than prognosticate what it’s like to be inside any of these people’s heads.

Maybe some Google IT-rock stars would have preferred that there never be any sculpting or talk of noFollow for link sculpting. Maybe Matt’s an awesome guy who has the privilege of operating outside the team and didn’t know. At the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

Google’s ambassador seems like the kind of guy who operates in the interest of community, and can handle the gig. WTF? Are we at a place now where SEOs ask questions like “who’s on our side and who’s not?” Or can we put this cloak and dagger bullshit to bed?

Let’s get this out of the way: Matt Cutts is the head of Google’s web spam team. He is perceived as a rock star in the industry and everywhere he goes he is a followed by a giddy horde of search marketers. SEO trends and techniques live and die by the words of the affable Mr. Cutts.

Yet there remains a healthy degree of skepticism and about Google’s advice. At the end of the day, the various teams at Google are doing what’s best for Google’s search users, which is not always best for an SEO’s clients.

Continuing the SMX Advanced tradition, Matt was kind enough to sit down with Danny Sullivan once more to take on audience questions in a You & A with Matt Cutts.

Danny: Let’s save the paid links fisticuffs until the very end, so you can be prepared. First of all, I wanted to let you start it off, so any general responses

Matt: I was in the the link panel, some interesting tips. Like how Hamlet (Batista0 was “don’t worry about pagerank” focus more on looking at freshness of crawl, I thought that was pretty cool. Looking at clickthrough, search snippets, if that entices more people to click, I thought that was very cool stuff. SMX  is always one of my favorite conferences. One thing I wasn’t expecting was the Seattle sunburn.

Danny: I saw Brent Csutoras running & saying, I’m gonna get sunburned!

Question: How can you tell if your site is in the penalty box?

Matt: There’s different types of penalties, typically for things that are simple, hidden text or we think you got hacked. There are nuances, things like we don’t trust all of the links coming in or going out of the sites. If you see a sustained drop in rankings, that’s significant and there are webmaster forums and great SEO’s that you can ask that question of.

Danny: If a site that falls in the category of knowing spam, should they still put in a request?

Matt: It’s sort of like the credit card companies, you can’t really tell all the penalties you really have without giving it away for the spammers.

Q:  Previously, you supported Pagerank sculpting, and it seems that it is not something you support anymore. Also, is that now a negative indicator?

Matt: No, definitely not. However you want to do the links in your site, that’s okay. You can use Nofollow on sign-ins, but it’s a far better use of time to work on site architecture. If you have 10 links and 5 are nofollow, there is this assumption that the other 5 get page rank. That might have been partially true at one time, but that’s less effective these days. You’re not going to get a penalty, or get in trouble, there’s better uses of your time. If your using Nofollow to channel page rank around your site, it’s like a band aid, focus on designing your site  purposely to sculpt Pagerank.

Danny: Why is it less effective when we talked before in 2007, like when you talked about Youtube. What has changed that is no longer worthwhile?

Matt: With Youtube, the position hasn’t actually changed. What’s happened is that links to individual videos are Nofollowed, the specific situation is that the Youtube team said “here’s the main page of Youtube with a lot of random page rank, we didn’t want whatever random video ends up on the homepage to get massive amounts of page rank.” That was a deliberate choice by the Youtube team. You can use Nofollow who you want on your site, just be aware of what you’re not channeling page rank to.

Danny: With Youtube, rather than trying to inflate value of remaining stuff, it’s about trying “not to” inflate value of remaining stuff, but what was the actual change?

Matt: Initially if you had 10 links, and 5 were no followed, the other 5 would get the remaining page rank, it’s not that way these days. It bubbled up from the indexing team and  it could change in the future. Whenever we see people talking about that, it is a good chance to steer the in the right direction.

Q: If you were trying to mitigate the Nofollow sculpting, doesn’t that say that it’s working?

Matt: Suppose you have 12 featured videos, if those 12 videos are there when the Googlebot comes, they get an enormous amount of page rank. From the beginning their intention was for page rank to flow around the site more evenly.

Q: How does Google look at the issue that I can buy suspect links and point them at my competitor?

Matt: We try very hard so that someone can’t Googlebowl another person. We try to do things algorithmically, we use manual means.

Q: I remember reading that an SEOmoz page had display colon non-css and that it actually tripped some penalty filter, at the same time I’ve seen websites will use that and not be penalized, humans don’t see it right away, whereas the Googlebot will.

Matt: Make sure whenever you write your own mouseover code, you don’t rollout your own custom thing that no one has ever done before. We try to handle that in all the common cases. We try to detect hidden text but we try to have it not trigger on mouseover code, but that’s typical mouseover code. We want it to trigger on “display none, 999px to the right etc.” If you want to be safe, make sure you don’t just write your own weird code from scratch.

Q: What about AJAX to paginate something, is your advice the same thing “copy other people’s code?”

*Huge audience laughter*

Matt: You’re oversimplifying a bit, there are perhaps “libraries” you can use that aren’t just copying other people’s code. Common idioms.

Q: So there’s 10 links on home page, 5 pages Nofollowed, where is that link juice going?

Matt: You can think of it as evaporating.

Q: It’s actually hurting your site then?

Matt: Use it sparingly, use it for links you can’t vouch for, if you are a power user and there’s a page you don’t want (sign-in) that’s a fine page to use Nofollow on. The only thing I Nofollow on my blog is a subscribe link, which is not all that useful for the main web index.

Q: If there’s a Nofollow page from that main page, there’s evaporation?

Danny: When page rank came out, 10 links on the page each got 1/1oth of the link juice.

Matt: Page rank has changed over the years, academic papers on this are fantastic. Our models and the way we compute it and the way we determine is more sophisticated than when the original papers came out.

Q: I work for a large SEO firm, is there any harm in 301′ing an old website

Matt: If it’s a site we don’t necessarily trust, I don’t think so if you’re starting fresh.  Sometimes it’s better to just start truly fresh. We do our best to clean up the backlinks. As long as we see an earnest effort to combat this, that can really redeem you in our eyes; there’s nothing that says you couldn’t insert a hyperlink to send more information to us.

Danny: Do you get extra credit if it’s on Google docs?

Q: What about theme-ing the website, does it makes sense to do this?

Matt: If it’s a new link, I would not use Nofollow in most cases,

Danny: Matt are you looking at a website and saying “this site has a lot of information about law, it’s about law” or are you still looking at it page by page.

Matt: We are getting more sophisticated all the time, you’ll see in our related suggestions, we use the Orion algorithm and data to say “this is a good related topic’ we don’t use a bunch of Latent Semantic Indexing etc.”, but eventually over time we wan to find out that this site is about “blank” .

Q: My question is about duplicate content related to companies that private label their website. A job site with jobs in San Francisco that private lable the same listings to 10 different websites.

Matt: Great question, within a site I wouldn’t worry as much about a dupe content penalties. With multiple sites,  if you have the same content on 200 different sites, that could generate a a pretty bad user experience.

Will that hurt you? Not necessarily, but it could. Your question is about co-brands though, at one glance this co-branding might be helpful, but you’d surprised how many user complaints we get, it’s like “I called X different numbers and got the same guy.” If you are the originator of that content and do syndication with a news paper, you want the page rank to flow to the original domain.

Q: You don’t just find all of them as being duplicates?

Matt: Typically, what’s best for the users, we try to find that index balance.

Danny: You guys have click-change, that now you are actually reading javascript, but you said “if you have paid links, you can use javascript and your good”, now you’re not good?

Matt: As Googlebot got smarter we started changing our advice on this. What we haven’t mentioned is that elsewhere, even on the onclick, you can put a rel=nofollow on a link within javascript, you can do that if you want to be completely safe, I expect to see those stay safe.

Danny: I didn’t see that at all, I watch that close. I think we might be in violation with our own site, I thought we were good, how quickly do we have to fix this?

Matt: My short answer is that javascript has not been a problem. Major networks have been doing iframes on things are in robots.txt anyways. Common URL redirects/ad networks are basically already covered.

Danny: Do I get until the end of the year?

Matt: Probably best if we do a blog post about that. Vanessa Fox did a great article about how javasript is more likely to be crawled and followed than it used to be.

Danny: You guys don’t like paid links, in particular it started out like “links are like votes, you don’t want people buying votes” that’s clear cut, I’m happy with that. But then all these weird things started going on, recently the thing with Techcrunch where they have a webcam and then they have an article about the company sponsoring  the webcam, what’s the deal, the article is written by the person sponsoring the cam, but they didn’t use Nofollow.

Lastly, Google IM last week invited all these developer and at the end of the day Google said “By the way,  you’re all getting free android phones!” Shouldn’t you accost all of them with little notes saying, if you link to Android, use Nofollow because we essentially bought the links. I feel like my head’s spinning, people are confused

Matt: You can continue to see broken HTML from 10 years ago used today, it’s an educational process for the entire world. Okay the crunch cam – it’s a webcam that shows Technrunch offices, if you want to sponsor it, we’ll link to you.

I  talked to Techcrunch about the link, the editorial side doesn’t even know, which is great. I said, look if someone is paying you, you should really put Nofollow links for the Crunchcam sponsors. The short answer is, I asked the author whether they knew about this, he’s a respected journalist I trust.

Danny: Someone sponsors your website – Nofollow. Somebody writing content – you shouldn’t have to worry bout that?

Matt: Reporters at the New York Times, if they think it’s the right thing to do to a particular site, that’s a great editorial link.  The Federal Trade Commission has interesting things to say on this – if you give money that’s clear cut, if someone loans you something that’s not so clear cut. There’s a spectrum of how you are involved.

The FTC says there may be a violation if there’s a material connection – if there’s a connection between the endorser and seller that might materially affect what you would say. My answer to the Android phones was that they used them to get people to develop Android applications not links. In 2002 we became one of the most linked-to pages in the world. We tend to not even think about gathering links. The last thing I want to say, is there is the spectrum of how money is involved and how people want to manipulate rankings.

The vast majority of things we see are where money is directly exchange, it’s not “Hey I’ll get you a  6-pack of beer.” I would like to talk to people and clarify it more. The common case is “you give me 20 dollars and i will link to your dish network whatever.”

Danny: What about contests?

Matt: When a contest says “and you have to link to us to enter” that’s much closer to what we are talking about . If you’re doing a contest, don’t make it explicitly your goal to get links.

Danny: Be subtle about it.

*huge laughter*

Matt: Shannon Yellen tweeted something fantastic “Social media is about visibility, it’s about buzz, and then it might be because of that, that people choose to link to you.” It’s not about links, it’s about doing something really cool that people like that they will link to. I’ll tell you right now, you make something really nice, and the links are so much easier to get.

Q: I have a site called Viral Conversations, we put manufacturer’s in charge of people that want to give free products to bloggers, it seems like exactly what you’re doing, except we have to go through extra steps and it seems like you’re profiling?

Matt: If you’ve got pay per post, that’ says “pay links.”

Q: Why do I have to put Nofollow but you don’t have to put Nofollow?

Matt: Google does not want to rank for cellphones, we want developers to make cool stuff.

Danny: In your view if you give someone a product, we’d like to buy a link?

Q: Android.com got links because you gave them away.

Matt: That’s not what we were looking for.

Danny: I have to clarify, because you two are going to do that back and forth. You’re not telling these people “don’t Nofollow your links to us.”

Matt: The closer you get to giving money, trying to do this to get links. To be clear, as a webmaster you can do whatever you want on your site, I’m just giving the guidelines and the sort of things we keep in mind.

Q: What is up with your blog?

Matt: I wanted to try a new webhost, with my previous webshot, every time i showed up on Digg, it went down. So I wanted to test this webhost to see if they can withstand the Digg effect. I was just putting my foot in the water (with the 302’s) to test out this new webhost. What I expected to happen was that my site would plummet, and what pleasantly surprised me was that they did go down, but not as much as i thought, about 25%.

Danny: We are going to 301 to the reception so thank you for being here.

Social media has crept into nearly every aspect of SEO to where it’s now quite difficult to imagine them disentangled from eachother. Keyword research traditional to SEO is being used to advise every tag, tier, and title in brand social media efforts. Go ahead and find me an SEO who says “I don’t do social media”,  they’re either speaking figuratively, are blissfully unaware, or have an extremely rare vendor relationship.

What do we now know to be true about SMO that we didn’t know 1 year ago or even 3 months ago? What social media principles have stood the test of time? Should we reignite a serious dialogue on ethics in social media optimization?

Search Engine Strategies New York 09 brought some of the best and most outspoken search & social media marketing figures together for the session “An Update on Social Media Optimization“, moderated by Search Engine Watch’s managing editor Kevin Newcomb.

Leading the session was Liana Evans, director of internet marketing at KeyRelevance.

Li asks, how did we get here with social media, how did it become a powerhouse? We used to market with TV & Radio, throwing out messages while consumers sat and took it. The internet has now allowed consumers to express feelings, share experiences and much more. This is what social media is about, connecting those who share similar feelings,  interests and experiences.

Social media does not mean drop your PPC and SEO, it should compliment them. It’s time consuming, not a fast process, and it’s not about putting any article on digg and automatically getting 10,000 visits.  It’s different for everybody.

The biggest thing to remember is that people hate to be marketed to. The minute you start marketing to them, they will cut you off.

It’s also about the end user and the new signals of search. Search engines are looking at reviews, product tags, chatter in social media sites. It’s not so much about links, not to say that links are going away.

It’s also about where your audience are. There’s photo sharing on Flickr, video sharing on Youtube. There are all different types of people in social media: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives as archetypes among them. Joiners join facebook, creators create blogs, critics review. What are these people doing in  social media, watching videos? Start looking at video sharing communities if you haven’t.

Start out by defining your goals,  some useful social media metrics include comments, ratings, links, twitter followers, retweets, number of reviews, # of people that ask questions.

From Social Media Rockstar to President
Barack Obama is the prime social media success story. He needed to reach college kids, African Americans, women, blue-collars, and independent voters. He created the conversation in his own community and it facilitated amazing  buzz right out of the gate.

He went full force into video sharing networks; he uploaded over 1,000 videos to his Youtube channel and had over 19 million views and 133,000 subscribers. He put photos on Flickr and moved other users to upload their own Obama-inspired photos out as well. He had a Linkedin profile, with Q & A and groups.  He had a profile on Black Planet, one of the largest social networking sites and he had over 480,000 friends. He twittered, and though it was not technically him, it lead to heavy discussion.

When you search for Obama, his profiles are showing up all over, they completely dominated the SERPs. As for the end results: he of course won the female, African American, young, blue collar and independent vote.

To sum Li’s advice: be social, start a conservation, be transparent and remember the end user.

Next was Dave Snyder, co founder of  Search and Social, presenting on the problem of “cookie cutter social media” approaches. Dave warned us in advance that his speaking style is stream of consciousness, but I found his message to be actually very linear and natural to absorb.

The biggest problem Dave sees in social media is that it’s mostly approached from a high level. “Cookie cutter process people” are delving into social media in the wrong way. Don’t keep using the same social media tactics client to client, platform to platform, expecting similar results.

When a Cookie Cutter Goes Wrong
Don’t just use templated social media examples like things you’ve heard at conferences. Don’t apply these social media tactics to ridiculous products that don’t match the format.

His prime example of a social media offender was Overstock.com

1. Overstock.com put a social community on their site that nobody used, it became a haven for spam; advertising for teeth whitening kits and the like.
2. They decide to take their “success” on the road by creating a Facebook page, ending up with near zero human engagement.
3. They tried integrating product purchases into Facebook stream. So the guy who buys an engagement ring on Overstock for his fiancee ends up tipping her off before the big surprise.
4. Overstock tried twitter, and their early tweets were about birds pooping on their head.

Why have a Facebook business page for a Motoroil company? Think about why  anyone would want to interact with your company in that channel? Pizza Hut has a Facebook application to help you order pizza directly on Facebook, why?

Just because “motor oil” doesn’t play in Facebook, it doesn’t mean that social media isn’t for you. Find niche sites, understand what content works on which platforms. Digg and Reddit are both social news sites, but the content is completely different.

Set measurable goals, this is the biggest flaw in social media ( I thought the cookie cutter templates were?) We’re in this business to make money, don’t inflate your job. We all want to think of ourselves as creative, but who cares if you aren’t making money.

Know how each community can actually benefit you and what they can bring you. If your end goal is links, focus on social news sites like Digg and Reddit. If your goal is conversation, focus elsewhere.

Use an analytical approach, there are lots of ways to measure social media, think outside of the box.

Number 1 rule: you get what you give. You give content back to the community that they really like. If all that you’re giving a network just bothers users and doesn’t add value, you’ll get no value in return.

Speaking next was president of Milestone Internet Marketing, Benu Aggarwal. Benu spoke on the agency and customer side of managing a brand online.

You need to tell your client what is important. Explain to them why it is important to have a Facebook profile. Understand that you really need to do it all, you have to kind of do everything together to impact your universal search.

User Generated Content – Find out what are the top 3 most important UGC sites related to your client. You of course need to enhance your profile, tag the most important keyword phrases, and even add video. If your client’s customers are going there, you need to create a cross-awareness.

Video Content – How do you create relevant video content and video on the fly? It may be as simple as a Flip camera that can shoot raw and compelling video that you can upload to Youtube in 10 minutes. Make videos your customers are looking for and that have value. You can advise the video content and tags by keyword research, as you would with traditional SEO efforts.

Photo Sharing – Yes you can create a Flickr account, but go even further. One thing that works well is to upload pictures to Flickr, then create a community map, and reference your pictures across social communities you’re active in. Link to your Flickr pictures from your blog or Facebook profile. Go ahead and integrate links to your social media profiles in your local listings. Tag up every one of your properties with consistent but community-relevant tags from keyword research.

Personal Social Networks -  Devise how can you make your business profile(s) personal. Add widgets, twitter feeds, blog feeds, and be sure to join groups and associated networks, add special offers, give away white papers; these are just a small few of the potential avenues you can pursue.

Twitter (microblogging) – If you’re writing a blog post, go on twitter and tweet about it. Use tweet deck or tweet beep to alert yourself to people who you should care about and who would care about you.

*At this point Benu’s phone goes off and scares Marty Weintraub

Blog Architecture – Before you create the blog, define what your going to talk about, advise by keyword research, take a holistic approach.

Putting it all Together
Put links to your social media profiles across eachother, integrate them all. Your social media properties with higher page rank will help pull up your profiles that may not rank as well.

Don’t forget the pitch, what are you going to say, show or do that would make your customers actually want to be your friend in a social media network?

Presenting next was Marty Weintraub, president of aimClear. Marty let the crowd know that he was mainly sharing the social media stuff that “rocked the most” to him.

Twitter is to virility as SEO is to PPC – We now have access to the ultimate focus groups to prove marketing messages. I would have died for that kind of demographic research in the past.

Use PPC to SEO multivariate testing – PPC moves much faster and is precise/controllable. You’re using paid search to prove organic success in funnels, conversion, design etc. You can then turn off PPC… or not.

With linkbait, it’s all about the idea – Use twitter to find out if something is cool or sucks really fast –  it validates marketer’s instincts.  Use Twitter as massive research tool. Look back at the tweets for “Zombie Dating” for example.

Use Tweetdeck for stunning demographic filtering – You can set up searches by # (unique hashtags) or keywords and receive on-the-fly updates.

Publishing properly means more in 2009 – Inputting content to the grid by the intersection of your content management system and social media. Ideally, as soon as you hit “publish” on a blog post, it’s prewired up to automatically be pushed through your Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds etc.  You can touch millions of users quickly.

Take an inside -out content promotion strategy -  Audit your inner circle of marketing team members, identify which insiders are already active in communities. They are pushing content through Twitter and Facebook and quickly expanding this inner circle

Sock puppets are dead, long live avatars! – Pseudonyms make business sense sometimes but you should use only corporate brand ambassadors that are genuinely engaged. No fake Linkedin or Facebook “people”.  Whether you choose to use your actual name or not, always be authentic and holistic.

Our closing speaker was the affable Chris Winfield, president of 10e20.

Chris says to get back to the basics, forget most of what you hear about the “newest thing”, there are so many new things that suck, like Plurk (aimClear does not necessarily share or refute this opinion). Tune out the noise and focus on figuring out what works for you. This stuff is simple, and people try to make it more complicated than it is.

Experiment, test and try new things. Don’t get caught up in the hype of Twitter, Facebook,  Digg, whatever it is; they’re not the end all be all. Be suspect when someone says “this community is all we do to market our company.”

Balance what works for you.  Should you do a Facebook Page or a Facebook Group? Or don’t do a brand group at all; make a group about a subject that your customer would talk about.

Don’t forget about forums just because they’re not sexy; they were social media before social media (Amen man).  Bigdashboards.com is a site that ranks forums across different criteria, check it out to find a forum where your customers are.

You have to get involved, not just to give back and be a good person, but to understand what people like, what content is successful and what offers people will react to and get business for you. Never forget the end goal. Don’t use twitter just to tweet.

Large Social Sites vs Targeted Niches
Everyone hears about Digg, the bigger blogs are going on social news sites looking for content. The sad part for most people is that Digg won’t work for them. At this point the bigger blogs are really looking for “big magazine” stuff you read everyday.

One of the most powerful things to do is to find targeted niche social news sites and Chris is going to give us every single one that works! Out of over 18,000 that exist, Chris whittles the list down to about 40 useful sites. Though they may drive just 500 visitors rather than 50,000,  it’s 500 very focused visitors. Often because of the niche site’s smaller community, it’s easier to make things go hot if your content lines up.

How a Niche Social News Site Works:
Stories that go hot on these sites have likely potential to get picked up by the larger social  networks, then on to 2nd tier blogs and so on.

Chris gives away his good list of 40 sites, too many to list during the course of a presentation. Some sites he mentioned offhand include Tip’d, The Motley Fool, Dealigg, ThisNext, BallHype, and N4G. Check out Chris’ blog for the complete list of niche social news sites that work.

Chris Winfield’s Final Tips
Test to find what works, scrap what doesn’t, be active and helpful in communities by giving back,  leverage all of the different social site, and go niche.

A hallmark of the Search Engine Strategies conferences has been the  “first look” and stage demoing of bleeding edge search marketing tools before they go live and eventually change the world.

Rather than the unveiling of a brand new tool performing functions we didn’t know we needed, the search marketing community at SESNY 09 received something long asked for (and long overdue) with the Google Workshop: Preview the New Adwords Interface session.

Google Adwords product lead Ariel Bardin & engineering lead Angela Lai were excited to share the new tool with us, with the admittedly “selfish” goal of receiving feedback to further improve it.

So Why Update Adwords?
In the past, new report types, bidding types and ad formats have been added, but now its time to take  a step back; to analyze and understand everyday things to make our user’s lives easier. So Google traveled the world, going as far as India and China, talking to advertisers large and small. One visit in particular in Mumbai stuck out to Bardin, a travel agency that  previously could not have operated without PPC and Adwords. How else could this quaint Indian shop  find someone in Canada that wants to take a trip to India?

What Google Found
Google looked at tasks, anything that was task intensive, including things like digging through Adwords to find a low performing keyword and the editing interface in general.

The New Adwords Interface In A Nutshell

• ROI improvement, more transparent, more data, but more importantly – more context for the data.

• Efficiency, everyone wants to be able to use Adwords quickly to move  on to other things.

• Clarity, it should be intuitive to make sure you can actually learn to use all of these tools.

A Walkthrough of Where Adwords Currently Needs Improvement
Their is the cumbersome task of finding your most expensive keyword, where is it? The campaign and ad group structure gets in the way and you’re not seeing keywords across ad groups/accounts.

Today they have a report center where you can create a new report, but the report still just looks and acts like a piece of paper. Where’s the editing functionality?

Ariel Bardin Demos the New Adwords Interface
Ariel notes that during the new Adwords trial, you can switch back and forth between the current and new interfaces. Be sure to give Google feedback, it’s not going into a black hole, Ariel assures us that he and Angela will read it.

Back to the question, which is my most expensive keyword?

There is a now an account level keyword tab, click on that, sort by Max CPC and you now see your most expensive keyword

(an audience applause and then unsureness of their own clapping)

The Tree Navigator allows you to jump between different adgroups easily

In regards to clarity, there’s a new Adwords help widget that conditionally changes depending on what they’re doing

For the power users, there are now keyboard shortcuts, jump around the whole UI without a mouse

The panels on the left of the interface are hidable for a cleaner work environment

Back to keywords, there is now inline editing you can do within the keyword tab across all accounts, changing match type and bid etc

The status includes a lot more information now, including quality score, components, relevance, landing pages, and any problems

Now you can edit everything within a report in the UI, you can jump around and use shortcuts in these keyword spreadsheets

You can now just click on a button to get to search query report, no going to the Report Center

Now you can pick a subset report and query just by keywords, again, across adgroups

The search query report is no longer a piece of paper. You can make certain keywords a negative, change match types, add keywords, set bids, all within the search query report interface

Copying good performing keywords from one campaign to another is now done with  a simple copy option

(a papery yet earnest applause)

Ariel says you should expect to see more functionality in getting Adwords information out, integrating into excel etc.

You can now apply business rules in a filter, find keywords you care about, and apply a quick bulk change

You can create multiple filters to create complex business rules and save them for future use

Better integration Google Analytics functions, comparing multiple options such as impressions vs costs, updating in real time

What’s changed in context? At nearly every level you’ll be able to easily analyze performance over time

Expect access to more data types in the future, Ariel stresses user feedback again

Editing ads is simplified, editing ads can take place right where you see it

(audience claps like thunderous team of horses)

Google will now start showing “pending approval” in status, and you can utilize this by setting a filter

Ariel begins creating a new ad, again it’s the same location, no separate wizards

Ariel sets up a filter to show all disapproved ads, and editing in line allows you to tweak it at once

Adwords now has automatic placement, if you give Adwords your keywords, the tool automatically figures out where you can run on the content network

You can see the domains of all content network sites your ads are running, you can examine CTF per domain, if you want more control, you can add this to managed placements, where you can set a bid, you can treat them much like you treat keywords, and you can change your bid to get more exposure on the specific domain

You can also exclude domains in the content network

(audience is now clapping like an excitable colony of rabbits)

Ariel queried the crowd about the changes, who seemed to completely agree that the changes are good

Ariel then invited Angela to speak on the technology behind the new interface.

Angela Lai Presents the Technology Behind the New Adwords Interface
Angela wanted to give background on the three primary design principles leading to the new interface

Speed Matters – Response time of the app should be good for advertisers, lends itself to quick task completion, consolidating redundant tasks and needless navigation

Give guidance at the right time – The help widget is in context and the help context changes, there is a greater integration of knowledge base. Google wants to give you a lot of information, but they also allow you to “zip away” things when you don’t need them, like the hidable left panel. You can maximize your screenspace at will to help focus your work.

Context is aided when viewing and editing your data takes place in the same location. Having the data inline with your editing goes a long way towrds this.

Consistency - Frustration over the “million ways” to find a button to edit things, the edit function tries to be uniform everywhere you find it. Things as simple the differnt color schemes of editing vs data panels, differentiating between data you provide and data adwords show you as well.

Powered By Google Web Toolkit
This is the inhouse tool for adwords, it gives you an asynchronous AJAX interface, for richer interaction, the page is much more interactive overall.

New Infrastructure of Data at Your Fingertips
More backend infrastructure overall to support the data being shown, filtering and sorting happens quicker because they put more google technology behind the advertising platform Expect new features in the next couple of weeks, the demo’ed CTR keyword level sorting can be automated into an alert format.

(firecrackery applause)

All products they do are a work in progress, they believe in launching early and using feedback and they will be rolling out several more changes over the next weeks and months as feedback comes in, and “hissing” is very very welcome.

Bardin closed by asking the lucky SES NY crowd to signup to demo the new interface by visiting http://www.google.com/adwords/sesny

The new Adwords tool represents an amazing leap forward not just in terms of technology, but in workflow and ease of use. As Bardin and Lai have proven in this session, Google does read and integrate user feedback, it doesn’t just fall into a black void.

Today at SES New York, speakers focused on what Google has done and what they could do better in “Beyond Googling: Where Will Your Customers Be Searching in Five Years?” The session was moderated by (one of our favorites) John Marshall, SES Advisory Board, CTO, Market Motive.

Anne Kennedy, SES Advisory Board (another favorite), Managing Partner and Founder, Beyond Ink focused on video search:
•    Regarding spending, follow the money. Flat is the new up. Online is going to grow while general advertising spend will stay flat with TV ads getting the lion’s share. Additionally, social marketing sites and mobile phones are starting to move up the chart.
•    Trending:  Growth & projections show that search is going down while video will go way up (according to emarketer, November 2008).
•    Online US ad spending will increase despite declining total advertising spend.
•    Convergence of internet and TV, particularly on mobile, will drive spend.
•    Video screens are getting smaller.
•    Consider what the kids up to now.
•    Become aware of things such as Hulu which provides the ability to surf TV from a PC for free.
•    Google TV is running into some roadblocks with traditional roadblocks.
•    Watch the rise of video and mobile trends.  Daily mobile use has doubled in US.
•    What’s in it for Google? It has YouTube as a video platform.  Google TV is also a video ad platform. This gives them more ways to play which equals more ways to pay.
•    Small screen video is next big thing in search because it is ubiquitous, always connected and ready at hand.
•    Mobile convergence is rising.  Due in part by the iphone effect, mobile search rose 40% in 2nd and 3rd quarter of 08.
•    Watch the small screen.

Pauline Ores, SES Advisory Board, Senior Marketing Manager, Social Media Engagement, IBM Corporation:
•    Deep web, which encompasses spaces that Google doesn’t search (i.e. media, databases) is specialized and even larger than the World Wide Web.
•    Semantic web addresses complexity of users.  It makes it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines of the web.
•    Existing meta model puts themselves (Google) between the deep and semantic web and you.
•    New model has user directly linked to deep and semantic search. Twitter is an example. It searches but goes out directly to humans.
•     What can Google do?  They can get deeper by doing a better job with semantic web.   Semantic is more valuable because it is targeted and narrow. Get deeper with more content.
•    The challenge arose when another model rose up.  Not all people were going through Google.  People started helping each other.  Google’s model must change or they will have competition from other networks such as Twitter – which is a network of people with relationships with each other.

Frank Watson, CEO, Kangamurra Media focused on Twitter:
•    Is Twitter giving Google twedgies?  The question of the hour is whether or not Twitter will mature enough to become the new Google.
•    Arrival of the existence of something other than Google.
•    People like communing with other people for social interaction, ego stroking, information  sharing, picture sharing, etc.
•    A lot of companies make a lot of money on Twitter now.  It can generate some very serious traffic.
•    Could Twitter be Google’s Excite?
•    Twitter provides real time search.
•    Google loses in real time search so users ask friends instead of search engines.  This momentum can cause major change.
•    For example, news sites are saving money by getting people to Twitter instead of sending out reporters.
•    Google wins if Twitter gets too spammy or something else comes along
•    There are lots of tools for Twitter such as: Twellow (Twitter yellow pages), Twitterhawk, Twittervision and Twtpolls.
•    Twitter is giving people the opportunity to do anything they want.  The sky is the limit.

While, logically, the plethora of available information would indicate that no single search engine can possibly deliver it all, Google continues to dominate. In this session, “Is There Life Beyond Google?”, speakers empowered marketers to explore alternatives. The session was moderated by, Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media.

Speakers presented some common themes. One was that search today doesn’t give users what they are looking for. Why? Because many results continue to be mostly text, but, alas, there is hope for the evolution. The key is to understand what people are really looking for and to understand their intent. Then, in turn, give them a better experience and save them valuable time.

Dr. Larry Cornett, VP, Consumer Products Yahoo! Search gave examples of how Yahoo! answered the call. In the quest to understand intent, they launched drop down suggestions that completes the query for the user in the search bar. In response to the need to provide a richer, more relevant experience, Yahoo! launched Search Monkey which is a tool that can greatly enhance results by providing addition information in other forms .

“Boss,” allows users to create their own search engine since, for example, the search word “java” has two completely different meanings to a developer versus a sleepy person in the morning searching for the magic jolt of hot liquid. Boss Open Search also allows for monetization with its ability to show ads.

Yomtobian outlined the evolution of the internet from creating services to focusing on relevance plus  push and pull user generated content. In the present day scenario of social search, users benefit from each other.

Yomtobian outlined 3 cornerstones to creating successful social search: 1) Create efficiency and save user’s time by creating relevancy, and creating connections so people can connect with each other. 2) Remember that despite its warmth, it is still a computer and it cannot replace humans completely. Only people can tell you how they view the relevancy of search results. 3) Since 56% of users are so comfy with Google, they wouldn’t switch even if the alternate was better, incentives must be offered.

Austen Shoemaker, CTO, Cooliris , offered perspective about the visual web from the client side. Shoemaker feels the missing link is visual search that interacts with results without requiring the user to leave the search context. He suggests helping users see the big picture of what is available with tools that combine browsing and searching. The marriage of these actions can be very powerful and can enable greater user discovery.

Michael Benedek, Vice President, Business Development, AlmondNet says that to find the answer, we must first look at what makes Google successful. Consumers spend less than 5% of their time on Google, but no media company in history has aggregated so much consumer purchase.

Life beyond Google is not defined by an improved search engine, but by the aggregation of scaled consumer purchase intent data, and its availability on the pages where people spend money. While internet advertising will weather the economic downturn, marketers will need to focus more on performance. What does this mean? It means media owners will need more data.

This could present a challenge since most companies are data starved. Starved in an environment where consumers generate plenty of data. It’s like being thirsty and surrounded by clean water. All one has to do is bend down and slurp it up. Consumers are willing to share their data if they get the benefit of targeted ads. For instance, discovering that consumers browse before they buy and most complete their sale 2 or more weeks after the initial search could be highly useful.

Michael Leo, Director of Product Management, Ask.com stated that users are looking for new innovations that are not on Google. Innovations that include smart answers, related searches, and blended search that focuses on answers. Ask.com determined that user search queries on their site are in question form 3 times more than in other search engines. In response, Ask.com launched “Q&A” which provides a new way to provide compelling answers to users by indexing communities and providing answers within the web search results page.

The answer to a life beyond Google lies not in another search engine, but in enhanced features missing from Google’s one stop shop arsenal.

Association with domains perceived by Google to be in bad neighborhoods can get your domain blown out of Google or seriously crippled.. This reality has spawned a favorite tactic amongst malfeasant black hats, who use the wormhole to destroy competition. It’s happened to our friends and it can happen to you.

As the story goes, simply purchase a bunch of good ol’ fashioned India porn links anonymously to your competitor, a bucket load at once. Then turn in the target to Google for buying links, in the “report paid links” program and …you know the rest. Goodbye competition. There are other techniques to use in tandem, to practically insure that the target is destroyed. Obviously Google’s system is rife for abuse.

Before lovely Lisa Barone calls me out, we don’t DO this, but speakers at both SMX Advanced and SES San Jose (about as mainstream as it gets) highlighted the tactics for us all to gape at. Some were pretty upset. We’ve tested to confirm if it’s true, with throw away domains Google will never know we had anything to do with. Because good websites are vulnerable, it’s about time that Google gives webmasters the ability to disavow links in WebmasterCentral.

No Skin Off Google’s Nose
How could giving us that input possibly be bad for Google’s noble spam fighting efforts? We would simply log in to WebmasterCentral and, much like our ability to request URL removal, repudiate an inbound link by removing the “credit” from the index…no link juice, no bad Karma, no dolphins killed. The sacred algorithm remains intact. Gosh-gee Matt, isn’t the India site selling links the real problem? How can Google allow this tactic to exist?

We can’t help it if rouge idiots link or buy links to a site. We can’t help it if content is truly popular with the unscrupulous. If we’re going to pay the price for bad kids who admire us from afar or attack, then webmasters deserve the right to say “NO we don’t sanction their bad neighborhoods.”

Google kingmakers, while you’re trying to decide how much money to let us earn at Christmas, please consider this idea over braised beef tips and asparagus, with your pals at the ‘plex.

aimClear Blog’s homepage Toolbar PR ticked from PR5 to PR4 overnight. Also, TB PR seems to be distributed with more power & deeper within the blog. Imagine that… I happened to be reading Sphinn about Matt Cutt’s blog comment on the impending update, checked aimClear and noted the change. Upon a cursory glance several other SEM blogs, PR5 previously, have been bumped to 4. Hmmm…Smackdown baby….

Google has over 200 signals used in their ranking. It’s common to see lower-PageRank sites ranking over higher-PageRank sites. This can be confusing to those who obsess about PageRank rather than prioritizing  other factors that search engines may use to grade pages. Still, like Matt Cutts said on stage @ SMX Advanced in Seattle earlier this year, it’s better to have Toolbar PR than not.

PS: How can SEORoundTable still be PR4? It’s one of the most important sites in our industry.

PPS: Long Live SEO